


Bathtub Barracuda

by IfItHollers



Series: Margot's Room [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Background Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, M/M, Minor Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Minor Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Morning After, Richie Tozier's Werewolf, Werewolf Richie Tozier, be gay do crimes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:08:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29509479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IfItHollers/pseuds/IfItHollers
Summary: "There's no such thing as perfect. You're beautiful as you are, Courage. With all your imperfections, you can do anything." (The Green Fish/"Bathtub Barracuda,"Courage the Cowardly Dog, Season 4 Episode 13, "Perfect")Town House sex only solves so many things, and while Eddie's happy to have at least one matter settled, he has other problems. Namely: how does he get this werewolf out of his bathtub?
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: Margot's Room [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1801648
Comments: 17
Kudos: 123





	Bathtub Barracuda

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I'm tired of rewriting this chapter over and over again, and I promised [mads](https://twitter.com/maddiestern) that I'd do my best to update this series for their birthday. I just need to get past the awkwardness of writing and rewriting and retconning that last scene from Margot's Room, and THEN we can get back to werewolf smut, being as it is the foundation of this creative enterprise.
> 
> Content warnings: canonical violence (Bowers, It) against adults and children; ABBA; referenced violence against animals (the Pomeranian); medical anxiety and discussion of transmission vectors of illness, particularly through sexual contact or blood; Bill's stutter written by someone without a stutter doing their best; the Losers are gay, do crimes.

In his life, Eddie hasn’t allowed himself to indulge much.

So maybe he let himself look forward to the morning after in bed with Richie. Maybe he wanted to get Richie under the sheets—like a real person, instead of resting on top of the sheets like a large dog or something. Maybe he wanted Richie sprawled out on the mattress, big and inconvenient and unbearably sexy, heavy and warm against his side, his hair dried into funny shapes. Maybe he wanted Richie on top of him, both their arms stretched out over their heads, kissing despite their sour breath.

So maybe that’s what he wanted. Well, sue him. He wanted kisses and casual nudity and the ivory flat sheet draped over Richie’s back like a shield. After the last forty-eight hours, Eddie thinks they’ve earned it.

As he stares across the bathroom, his instinctive sense of _I must be dreaming, this isn’t real_ that comes over him immediately flattens. He lands somewhere between resignation and acceptance. Everything in Derry is extraordinarily difficult. Why would this be any easier?

All this is to say: why didn’t Eddie expect the werewolf in his bathtub?

He doesn’t know how he knows it’s a werewolf. It’s not like he spends a lot of time contemplating werewolves, even as they grew increasingly popular, even as Myra brought home those red and black books and developed opinions about them. He is not interested in the anatomy of werewolves. He doesn’t even care about the biological differences between wolves and dogs.

What he does remember is how the one that leapt out of the drain looked. It was straight out of thirteen-year-old Richie’s head, which means it was straight out of the B-movies. Richie named It before It even burst out of the drain, forced It to conform to his expectations: _It’s the teenage werewolf!_

The memory disappoints Eddie a little. It would be nice, right now, to force the world to conform to his expectations. He doesn’t have to make everything perfect. He just wants something that he can fight, now that he knows he can do that.

The werewolf in his bathtub does not look like Michael J. Fox in _Teen Wolf_. It does not wear a blue and yellow Derry High basketball uniform, or a letterman jacket, or shredded Levis. In fact, there’s very little about it that could be mistaken for human at all. It looks animal: all black hair, or fur, or whatever the difference is. The lighting in the bathroom is bad, and the shape itself is so dark that he only gets an impression of the hunched back behind the wedge-shaped head, a faint trace of light along the top of the skull that might be long pointed ears. And the blue eyes and the red mouth and the white teeth are so familiar.

Eddie knows those colors from clown makeup.

It’s large enough that it fills the bathroom completely under the ragged shower curtain. It looks like clotted shadow.

Eddie will have to lunge past it to get to the door, since he didn’t see it on his way in, and now that it’s just looking at him he knows there’s no way he’ll make it. He doesn’t stand a chance.

It just looks at him. Its mouth is open. Its teeth are long, very long, measurable in _inches_.

Bowers spilled Eddie’s blood on this bathroom floor just two days ago, and now Eddie is going to die in this room, because he was stupid enough to come back.

But the only sign of a struggle is the one Eddie never bothered to clean up, even when he brought Richie back with him. There’s no fresh blood in the room. Richie’s clothes are still in the bedroom.

Eddie takes a deep breath. “Where is he?” he demands.

He keeps it cold, like he does at work. _Where is the report?_ and _Explain to me why we have this policy_ and _Have you tried calling them?_ It’s not a question, it’s a cattle prod to make the target spill what they know.

But it’s a werewolf, so it doesn’t speak. It tilts its head back a little, its mouth wide open, all black and white and red, with the round blue eyes. Eddie is disgusted, but not in a way that frightens him. He’s just angry that he still has to put up with this shit.

“How many fucking times do we have to kill you?” he asks the long white teeth. “You don’t get it! You just don’t get it! You pick off scared little kids one by one! You can only handle _children_ when they’re _alone_!”

And because It likes children, It has to break families. It has to leave parents indifferent to the safety of their kids, or twist them in some say—take their real worry and turn them into monsters, into no safe haven, so that the kids are always alone. Eddie is the product of that. So is Bev. So is Bill, in a way. But they’re the adults who _survived_ Derry, who said _no more of this shit_ and went back into the sewers to put It down forever. It was the most frightening thing that Eddie ever did, but also probably the most meaningful. That’s Eddie’s legacy: a piece of stray garbage and _beep beep, motherfucker!_

So this—he can stand this. If it means buying the others a little time, he can manage it.

“You don’t know what the fuck to do with eight grown adults you’ve never been able to kill,” he says. “Humans are a _cooperative species_ , you dumb shit!”

Wonders on Patricia Blum Uris for coming with her husband to what Stan thought was his death, despite his ranting and raging and blistering terror. Eddie thinks he understands now—now that he knows he loves Richie, he thinks that if he’d been able to stop Richie from coming back to Derry, he might have tried. But it’s important that they all stand together.

Richie got up from Eddie’s bed while Eddie was sleeping and this monster was in the room with him, and Eddie slept through it. And that fucking enrages him. And rage has always made him braver than he is.

“Fucking stupid to go after Richie _after_ I got my dick wet, moron, what do you think I’m gonna do? You think I’m gonna be scared? No, motherfucker, we’re fucking pair bonded now, I’m gonna take your fucking eyes!”

The jaw closes with a wet slop. The werewolf’s bright blue eyes widen so far that they show red around the rims.

Animals don’t have human expressions. Anthropomorphism is a plague, a side effect of humans’ crippling capacity for empathy that endangers both man and beast. People adopt wild animals as pets and throw them away when they do something that reminds them how strong they are, how inhuman. People go to zoos and wander into enclosures like they think they’re welcome, and then are surprised when the lions shred them. Eddie, with the unsentimentality of a man who has never had a pet, does not care about an animal’s feelings.

But— _but_ —he would swear that this werewolf looks shocked.

Then it makes an awful noise—deep, concussive—in its throat. Eddie expected a growl, or even a roar. Something that would alert the others, that in the rooms above and below him would lead the Losers to know that something was wrong. But this sound, this _cough_ , really, somehow has Eddie’s knees wanting to give out.

He lurches for the door.

The werewolf flinches and there’s a thud from the tub; Eddie nearly falls but he throws himself through the doorway and slams the door behind him. He gets clear of it immediately, knowing that he won’t be able to hold the monster off, but hopefully the door slows it down even for a moment. He ducks around the bed to put another blockage between them and looks for something he can use as a weapon.

There’s a desk chair.

Who the fuck does he think he is, a lion tamer?

There’s a glass bottle of Perrier under the nightstand, just waiting for him to open it so that the Derry Townhouse can charge him thirty dollars.

Well, it’s his money or his life. He grabs the bottle, thinking of the weird shit in his toiletry bag: the needlenose tweezers, the nail scissors, even a sharp plastic cuticle pusher. Of all forms of murder, Eddie is best equipped to poison someone. But since he’s not about to offer the werewolf a refreshing glass of Perrier with some ground-up Quaaludes, he’s got to work with what he has. He settles behind the bed, on his knees, waiting.

Exactly nothing happens.

He expects the slam of a massive body up against the bathroom door, or even right through it. He expects splintering wood and a shape so large and powerful it seems to climb the wall and spill across the ceiling to get to him, to come down on him with only his improvised club to defend himself. He’s aware that his thighs are shaking.

Nothing. Everything is still.

Around the ringing in his ears, Eddie hears a high-pitched whine from behind the bathroom door. Then a faint thud—not up against the door, not the door shaking on its hinges, but from deeper in the room. Absurdly his first thought is of birds beating themselves to death as they try to get through a glass door. He should want that, right? Want the monster to be trapped so he can run and get help and tell the others what happened to Richie?

But why was it waiting for him?

That has never been Its style. It likes to lure them to places and then go in for the kill. It’s not above a jumpscare—fucking homunculus in the pharmacy and everything—but it almost always follows it up with an unstoppable attack. It never just sits there, waiting to be noticed, It’s always hunting.

And, more importantly, Eddie was never afraid of the werewolf. That was Richie’s fear—probably because of the sheer deluge of horror movies that his parents let him watch. Eddie was afraid of other things, of sexual threats, of his mother trapping him and suffocating him to death. A monster that you know is a monster is one thing, and there’s no shame in feeling afraid of it. A monster that you love, that you have to love, is far worse.

Where the _fuck_ is Richie? Eddie looks around for his phone, but then he remembers that it dried yesterday—after he walked through a sewer, which means that it’s probably ruined beyond the repair of any bags of rice—and he never put it on a charger.

The werewolf keeps thumping around in the bathroom: _thud, thud, thud_. Eddie hopes that it’ll annoy whoever has the rooms above and below him into waking, into coming and knocking on the door—only what if they won’t? Because if they think it’s just Eddie and Richie, in a hotel room, after the display that Eddie made of them yesterday at the quarry, they’ll probably just think they’re having ridiculously loud sex or something and give them a wide berth. Of course. This is what Eddie gets for losing all sense of propriety and decency and deciding to scale Richie like a tree. Eaten by a werewolf in his hotel room. Maybe Stan will even bang on the ceiling or the floor to tell them to keep it down.

From inside the bathroom comes the animal whine again.

He adjusts his grip on the neck of the Perrier bottle, trying to keep his sweaty hands in place. A full bottle is a club, and a broken bottle is a shiv. Eddie Kaspbrak is a risk analyst. He knows he’s fucking doomed, despite his bravado; he’s not Rambo, he’s a _naked_ dude who mays maybe one-fifty on a good day. It would be fucking nice to have the successful axe-murderer on his side here, _thanks, Richie._

And does he want to flee the hotel and try to get as many Losers out as possible? Or does he want them to come and try to help him and maybe be attacked in the process? The parts of him that know he’s stronger and better with his friends war with the parts of him that say he has to help them as best he can.

 _Thud. Thud. Thud._ Heavier, like the werewolf is trying to make a point. Then another whine, and then faster collisions: _thud, thud, thud_. Then silence.

Wait.

Eddie blinks several times and adjusts his grip on the glass bottle. Where the fuck _is_ Richie? Even if he got out of Eddie’s bed and was attacked by It, Richie has never done anything quietly in his whole life. There would be screaming, there would be swearing, there would be grandiose dramatics. And Richie would have fought—he’s big, he’s strong enough to throw a bicycle, and he likes improvised weapons, but he’s not above shouting at a fifteen-foot-tall spider that he wants to _dance_ unarmed.

And—he would have tried to make sure Eddie got out. He would have been a messy screaming distraction, and he would have begged Eddie to run.

Which means that It would have either fought two naked Losers in the middle of the night, or that It pounced on Richie so fast in the middle of the night that Richie didn’t have time to make a noise. Which has never been Its style. It wants them to be afraid.

And most importantly, It wouldn’t hang around in a bathtub waiting for Eddie to stumble across it stupidly, wondering if Richie climbed naked out the window.

The werewolf begins ululating, its white ratcheting higher. It’s fucking annoying and Eddie can’t think clearly, as it climbs in pitch and then drops down and back up again and—

It’s singing. What the fuck, it’s singing. Eddie doesn’t know the song, but it keeps thumping at the side of the bathtub, and—

That’s fucking Morse code.

Eddie’s not really up to date on Morse code. Can’t say he’s thought about it since high school. But he remembers Stan’s Boy Scout Handbook, the way he carried it around and showed them how to bake apples in tinfoil in a campfire, and all the pictures of the semaphore flags, and the different animal sounds he showed them how to whistle out on their thumbs. And then an exam in history class—Eddie, never a great test-taker, never great at handling his stress, with his head hunkered down against his forearms as he fought not to gnaw on his filthy pencil—and Richie across the room because the teacher had to separate them _again_ , drumming on his desk.

Short, short, short. Long. Long. Long. Short, short, short.

What the _fuck_?

If the werewolf’s mouth were open the sounds it’s making would be a scream, but it’s familiar now. It’s a tune. Eddie can recognize the pitches.

It’s fucking ABBA.

Eddie gets up, feeling out of his body in a way that he hasn’t since he opened a door expecting to see his death and instead found a fucking _Pomeranian_ — _thanks, Richie!_ He puts his hand on the knob. With the other he holds the Perrier bottle like a baseball bat. Then he jerks the door open and flicks the light on in one swift adrenaline-fueled motion.

The werewolf falls silent. With the light on, Eddie can see how it’s twisted at an angle. Its head is sunk low, just shy of the extended faucet, and its shoulders are hunched as though to try to keep it out of the way. It’s fucking huge. There’s a long ridge of hair, or fur, or whatever all along the line of its spine, and it turns so that the front half of its body is sitting up and the back half looks twisted on its side, somehow. Its chin—if werewolves have chins—is hooked on the rim of the tub, mouth open to show teeth at least three inches long, and it looks up at him with big blue eyes.

But not _bright_ blue, he can see now. Not the impossible blue of Bill’s hard stare, or the drifting unfocused gaze of the clown.

Eddie knows those fucking eyes.

Richie’s glasses are still folded in the soap dish.

 _No_ , Eddie thinks, but it’s not even outright denial. Pennywise isn’t sophisticated enough to dream up a horror that waits patiently in the bathroom for Eddie to get up and pee, that is hampered by a faucet, that sings ABBA to lure him back in.

“Where is Richie?” Eddie asks, not sure whether he wants to be right.

The massive mouth closes and the teeth fit together—not with the sheer overwhelming number of needle teeth that the clown and all its incarnations had, but in a natural way, an animal way instead of a demonic way. They’re still incredibly fucking long, but the black and red lips pull back from them, and the werewolf bares its teeth at him.

Or—smiles, awkwardly. Little whiskers above its eyes lift almost like eyebrows. Friendly.

_Hi. Yeah. Can we get the check?_

“Richie?” Eddie asks cautiously.

The werewolf responds instantly, head falling forward, eyes closing, teeth veiled as it blows out a breath. It— _he_ sounds relieved.

* * *

Let’s be honest. Life has been unfair on all of the Losers.

This is just fucking ridiculous.

Eddie gives up on standing. He slides down the doorframe to the floor. He’s painfully aware of his nudity, his flaccid dick, his skinny legs. The Perrier bottle no longer seems like a viable option—the only option—and now just sits cold on his thigh, shielding his junk from sight. He should get up and put on clothes—some indignities are too great to be borne while naked—but his legs are weak and shaky as the adrenaline trembles through them.

“And you’re in there?” Eddie asks. “You’re you? You’re not, like, overcome by animal instinct and going to maul me?”

Richie-as-werewolf opens his eyes so that he can roll them at Eddie. Eddie didn’t know that nonhuman animals were capable of doing that, but he’s learning a lot right now.

He slumps all the way back to lie on the floor. “Oh, thank god.” He takes some deep breaths. “Sorry, you just scared the shit out of me.”

Richie makes an animal grumbling noise. Eddie has no idea what to make of it. He looks up at the flat ceiling—he can see white paint there, and this seems like the kind of place that paints over their water stains instead of repairing leaks—and just kind of lies there while he waits for the shock to pass over him. He really should put his feet up and lie under a blanket to do full recovery, but that’s just not gonna happen for a little while longer.

He tilts his chin to his chest so he can look at Richie. There are traces of humanity in there—something uncanny about the placement of his ears, how close they are to his eyes, and those eyes’ human shape. The face is flatter than Eddie would necessarily expect of a wolf or dog, the mouth positioned far enough away from the eyes and the nostrils that it looks a _little_ like a human face. A human face with three-inch teeth.

“Why are you in the bathtub?” Eddie asks weakly, as though that’s the biggest problem here. It’s what he’d ask if he walked into the bathroom and found Richie—shaped as expected, the way he was when Eddie fell asleep last night—hanging out in a tub with no water in it. Why is he there?

The question _Why aren’t you a human?_ feels too big to pose to Richie’ directly. Like maybe Eddie has to go out into the parking lot and scream it at a cold and unfeeling blue sky, if he actually has to ask it out loud.

There’s a sort of scrabbling sound and a shift all along Richie’s back, but he does not move in any substantial way. He ducks his head a little further, trying to keep clear of the faucet, but that’s about it. He shows no indication that he’s going to leave the tub, and honestly that’s sort of a relief for Eddie. Right now, in order to keep comprehending what’s happening, Eddie needs the problem to be sort of contained.

“Are you stuck?” he asks.

Richie’s mouthful of big horrifying teeth reappears. He makes a ridiculous high-pitched wavering sound.

Absurdly, Eddie’s first instinct is to hush him. Like he has to hide the werewolf in the bathtub from anyone else who might be in the Townhouse. _Sir, can you quiet down? Well, I’d really like to, it’s just that my_ bathtub werewolf _won’t listen to reason._

“What the _fuck_?” Eddie manages, tipping his head back. He could laugh.

Richie is quiet.

Richie is never quiet.

Eddie sits up, folding his knees to shield himself. “Hey,” he says.

Richie lets his head sink as low as he can over the edge of the bathtub. Eddie is not up to date on werewolf body language, and he’s only just relearning Richie’s like he’s dusting off his high school French. He can tell when something’s wrong, when Richie’s up on stage with someone else’s words in his mouth, but it’s all rusty. Every time Richie shifts even a little, Eddie’s eyes track it urgently. Not for the reason he’s been sort of orbiting Richie for the last three days, but because now something in Eddie’s nervous system—or maybe further back, parts of his brain accustomed to being prey—reads a massive strange animal as something to watch out for.

But this is Richie. And—if he is to be believed, and right now Eddie doesn’t really see a reason not to—he’s not going to hurt him.

And he’s trapped in a bathtub.

Eddie becomes aware that he’s smiling only when Richie blows air directly into his face. He recoils, twisting away, but there’s no odor to it, just an impression of _heat_. “Hey, fuck you,” he says automatically. “I fucking told you it wasn’t a real Pomeranian.”

Immediately that deep coughing sound comes out of Richie again, and then he issues a growl pitching up into a whine. The initial scrape of it makes Eddie glad he’s sitting down—he doesn’t need to test his evolutionary fight or flight instincts against an actual wolf growl—but he can also practically _hear_ what Richie wants to say overlaid on it: _You told me to make it sit!_

“Well, excuse me for trying to manage a problem!” Eddie snaps back, and then is overcome by the werewolf in the bathtub again.

Richie coughs and then lets his mouth hang open, still glaring across the few feet of space at Eddie. His eyes are very round now, like he’s widening them at Eddie and thanking him for finally arriving at the same conclusion as everyone else. Richie has a distinctly nonhuman face right now, but he’s making his point.

“Okay,” Eddie says slowly. His choices are problem-solving or dissolving into hysterical laughter.

The same thing happened with Bowers. He had to laugh because a sudden unstoppable attack was so absurd that he didn’t know what to do with it. He doesn’t know what to do with this, either. He can remember now that he lives in a world where these things happen. He has sex with a guy one night, and then he turns into a _fucking werewolf_ and gets stuck in a _hotel bathtub_.

But it’s not just some guy, it’s Richie, and Richie is being made to sit still, and Richie can’t talk, and those are two things so central to Richie coping (Eddie remembers this, he always remembered this) that he’s probably melting down. So Eddie can’t completely lose it right now. This is probably the worst thing to ever happen to Richie.

His ass is going numb on the tile. And he sort of has to pee. He should have peed after sex. You should always pee after sex, and ideally before sex if you can, and the fact that the sex he had was not penetrative does not change that, because there was lubricant involved and the urethra is not sterile but also functions as a delivery system of bacteria directly to the bladder, and from there up to the kidneys. But Richie was right there and also definitely nodding off, and Eddie felt weird about taking the time to pee when he was trying to get answers out of him. Now Richie’s confined to the bathtub and the shower curtain hands limp and ineffective, so Eddie’s not going to interrupt the werewolf problem to go through his morning routine.

It occurs to him that, if Richie had turned into a Pomeranian, he would not have gotten stuck in a bathtub. Eddie would have gotten up to use the bathroom and drink some water, and he would have turned and seen a Pomeranian, and then he would have punted Richie through a window.

“I’m so glad you’re not a fucking Pomeranian, dude,” he sighs.

Richie makes a swooping grunting noise in response, the same intonation as _huh_?

He suspects that now is not the time to explain his thought process. He considers what to do. He has no hope of solving the werewolf transformation issue. He should probably start simple instead, with getting Richie out of the bathtub.

He considers exactly how large Richie is now. Does Eddie actually want Richie to get out of the bathtub? The idea of a werewolf in the hotel bathroom without constraints seems like a bad one.

But it’s Richie. Richie needs help.

Either way, Eddie’s going to have to investigate exactly how and why Richie is stuck. He takes a moment to remember that he’s naked and imagine leaning over him with his ass in the wind and his dick out.

“Let me go put on pants,” he says.

He moves the Perrier bottle out of his lap—Richie gives it what Eddie’s pretty sure is a _weird_ look—and stands, using the sink to haul himself up. His knees ache. His hips ache from sitting on the cold floor. He feels pointlessly self-conscious about being naked in front of Richie, who has already seen him naked and is also, technically, naked himself.

A slightly hysterical giggle slides up into his throat, but he swallows it down. He goes back to the bedroom, sets the Perrier bottle on the desk, and starts dressing.

It’s a little weird, because—he glances behind him and sees that the bathtub is not visible from this angle, which says unpleasant things about how long Bowers was hiding in his room but also means that Richie can’t see him—at the same time he’s imagining Richie on the bed. If Richie were the Richie that Eddie had expected—the one still sprawling naked on his bed, maybe making a show of how comfortable and sleepy he is—he would make jokes about Eddie getting dressed again. He’d say _Awwww_ as Eddie went over to his suitcases, and then say _Actually, never mind_ when Eddie bent over to work the zipper. Eddie would look up at him and shoot him a glare, but Richie would pretend not to see it while ogling his ass, and Eddie would pretend he didn’t enjoy being objectified, just a little, by Richie. He’s never really thought of himself as an object of desire.

It’s weird to fantasize about Richie when Richie is right there, right? It’s weird.

He just thought that this day was going to go so differently.

He puts on khakis and a dark red polo, glancing back to the bathroom door every few seconds. When he walks back to the bathroom, Richie’s eyes are on him immediately.

Eddie takes a deep breath and then says, “Okay, I’m gonna figure out how you’re stuck.”

Richie grunts. Eddie takes it for a _yeah_ , though Richie has never been cooperative without commentary before.

“Are you hurt?” Eddie asks, because that feels like an important thing to make sure of before he starts putting his hands on Richie.

Richie grunts again and then bobs his head in what is clearly a nod.

“You’re hurt?” Eddie asks. “Shit. Where?”

Richie twists his head to the side and widens his eyes at him. It’s _withering_.

Eddie sighs. Of course Richie can’t tell him where, or indicate by pointing to the body part in question—because he’s a fucking _werewolf_ trapped in a _bathtub_. Because these are their lives.

“Okay,” Eddie says. “I’m gonna—I’ll be careful, but don’t, like, bite me if I jostle something.”

Richie grunts and lowers his head again. His ears point backwards and flatten to his head. It looks almost sulky. Eddie remembers Richie as a kid, his shoulders climbing to his ears as he scowled out at the middle distance.

So Eddie, awkwardly, tries to feel exactly how Richie is stuck. There’s a certain terror to the idea of touching Richie like this—firstly because Richie’s not a dog to be petted, and secondly because if Eddie touches this absurd vision of Richie-as-werewolf his state becomes indisputable, any possibility that this is a strange dream vanishes.

He creeps his fingers along the lip of the bathtub and the moment he touches all that black hair Richie lifts his big wedge-shaped head and Eddie flinches. Both of them freeze—Eddie guiltily, and Richie… Eddie’s not sure. It’s hard to read his body language when his body is, by definition, unfamiliar.

“You all right?” he asks.

The grumbling sound Richie makes in response isn’t very helpful.

Eddie takes another deep breath and says, “Okay, I’m gonna touch you now, so.” And—deliberately, so he doesn’t give himself a chance to chicken out about it—he puts his hands on Richie.

It feels like a static shock goes through him. For a moment he thinks he imagined it, and then he sees that—much in the same way the hair on Eddie’s forearms is standing up—there’s a lng line of raised fur along Richie’s back. The hair is shaggy without being matted, but there’s a faint oiliness to it. Not like Richie’s hair at all—Richie’s hair is fine and dry when clean. The difference in texture is obvious as Eddie slides his fingers as far down into the bathtub as he can get.

The problem is obvious, once he feels it. Richie is too large for the bathtub. His hair is pressed tight to his skin where he’s squished up against the porcelain sides of the tub—probably not actually porcelain, since the Derry Townhouse is not that nice, it’s probably just plastic made to seem like porcelain—and Richie flinches again. Eddie doesn’t push down because he can feel how tightly Richie’s sealed in—Richie’s ribcage is crammed improbably into the tub. That’s not just skin and muscle and fat and hair crushed in there, that’s bone, and that explains why Richie has no give whatsoever.

“Oh, shit,” Eddie says, drawing an invisible ring along the inside of the tub as he feels for a place with any wiggle room. “Can you draw a full breath?”

In response Richie drags in a loud and sucking breath. He breathes properly—Eddie can see the rise in his back and feel the tension shift around his stomach as he inhales into his belly—but his ribs don’t move.

“Okay,” Eddie says. “Okay. Are you dizzy, at all?”

Richie turns his head slowly, face swinging around to look over his shoulder at Eddie. Eddie is once again struck by how _large_ and _unfamiliar_ and implicitly _dangerous_ Richie looks right now, and starts to feel a little dazed himself. He breathes in, trying to steady himself. Richie shakes his head, but not like a human—instead like a dog thrashing something to pieces.

“Not dizzy?”

Richie shakes his head again.

“That’s good,” Eddie says, and has to sit down. He puts a few feet between himself and Richie in the process, and honestly that’s sort of a relief too, though he won’t admit it to Richie. “But it hurts?”

Richie groans. Eddie understands what he means: Richie in human form is barrel-chested, but he’s so large now that he can’t fit in a standard-sized bathtub, which means that he’s even _bigger_ , which means that his… _voice_ , for lack of a better word, is deeper. The sound comes from deeper in his chest than it ever would from his own body. But the noise cracks up high almost into a whine, and Eddie understands that too, that almost-plea for sympathy.

“Okay,” Eddie says again.

He doesn’t want Richie to be in pain, but right now he sees two options: either turn Richie back into a human, so that he’s small enough that the sides of a bathtub can’t bruise or crack his ribs—and he doesn’t touch Richie’s ribcage any more, for fear of discovering whether Richie snaps when something hurts—or get Richie the werewolf out of the bathtub, so that the external pressure is no longer an issue. And Richie clearly can’t get out of the tub on his own, or he would have already; and Eddie is reasonably strong for a middle-aged office worker, but he doubts he’d be able to manipulate or move Richie, big as he is now.

Not that Eddie knows how to turn a werewolf back into human form either.

He considers the problem before them and decides that he’s not equipped to handle either outcome. But—however—in his friend group he has an internationally bestselling horror novelist, two psychics, a six-foot-four man who is one of the world’s leading experts on the occult, and a man who builds houses. And Patty, who might turn out to be a delightful surprise when it comes to bathtub werewolf removal. Either way, introducing six more people can only improve their odds, as long as everybody stays calm, agrees that that’s a sentient Richie in there and not a trap, and nobody has any silver projectiles.

“Okay,” Eddie says. “I think I’m going to have to call in the big guns.”

Richie gives him a skeptical and withering look, then blows air through his teeth so that his lips flap against his gums. It is clearly the werewolf equivalent of a raspberry.

* * *

At first Eddie intends to text Mike, but then he remembers that his phone is dead. He remembers this when he goes to pick it up and a big bubble rolls across under the screen. Richie whines at him when he leaves the room, and Eddie responds to him, making up Richie’s half of the conversation.

“Because I have a Master’s in business management, and Mike spent thirty years hunting a demon. He’s the closest thing we have to an expert.”

In response, Richie makes that deep coughing sound again. Somehow it imparts skepticism.

“That’s why I said _closest thing_ , genius,” Eddie snaps back. “And ritual or no ritual, if you have anything _closer_ to a werewolf expert, I’m all fucking ears, man.”

Richie growls, but it’s a thin sound from the other room—an expression of annoyance, but not a threat.

“And more importantly.” He throws the phone down again and leans into the bathroom doorway so that he can make eye contact with Richie. “We’re not gonna work out anything by ourselves in this hotel room, and I have to pee, and you can’t stop me. So there.”

Richie’s ears go from annoyed, flat back against his head, to lifting inquisitively, to flat again. Then he gives a great lurch and Eddie sees his shoulders shift, hears a scrabble of what sounds like nails on the porcelain, but Richie does not move.

“It’ll be fine,” Eddie assures both Richie and himself with an enthusiasm he does not feel. “If it’s just me you’re stuck with, you’re gonna end up living in a bathtub in Derry as a werewolf for the rest of your life.” Richie shows his teeth and Eddie wrinkles his nose. “Put those away. Also the rest of your life will be about two weeks long, because I don’t know what the fuck werewolves eat.”

But based on the long teeth Richie appears to be reluctantly covering, it’s meat.

“So Bill’s, like, attached to Mike at the hip. He’ll know where to find him, he’ll call Mike or maybe we’ll have to go back to the library to get him, it’ll be fine,” he says. The _it’ll be fine_ doesn’t sound any more convincing than the first time he said it.

Richie grumbles. It sounds like stones being poured into the bathtub. For something so big that he’s trapped in a plumbing fixture, he looks somehow small at this angle.

“I’ll be right back,” Eddie says. “Back as soon as I can. I’m not leaving you like this, okay?”

Richie’s ears rotate, no longer pushed back but turning out to the side, still pointing down. He stares at the tile on the bathroom floor. Eddie doesn’t know much about werewolves, but he’s pretty sure that this is Richie sulking again.

“I promise,” he says. “I’ll be right back. It’s gonna be fine. We’re going to handle it.”

He leaves before he can chicken out, and as the door swings shut behind him, he wonders if he’s said anything that means anything at all since he woke up.

Bill’s room is on the first floor. Eddie walks down the stairs in a haze, remembering how Richie practically chased him up them last night. He knocks on the door and waits for several seconds, but it’s still kind of early. He would understand if it took Bill a few knocks and a call of _It’s Eddie_ to get a response.

Instead, there’s movement inside and the door opens almost immediately. The security chain clinks as it stretches to its full length and then stops.

Mike blinks down at Eddie with one eye visible in the slice between door and frame.

“Oh,” he says.

“Oh,” says Eddie.

The blush hits him in the face almost as a delayed response. He doesn’t know why he’s blushing. Just because Mike is here doesn’t mean anything—just because Eddie and Richie slept together doesn’t mean anyone else did, everyone else probably has better coping mechanisms than Eddie does, Eddie shouldn’t go making assumptions about other people.

Mike clears his throat. “I thought you were housekeeping. Uh. Is everything okay?”

“No,” Eddie says. The words catch on something like a laugh trying to come out of his throat. He has no idea what words to put together in what order to explain the problem. “Richie’s—stuck. We need help.”

Mike blinks once, his concerned expression intensifying. “Is he okay?”

“Uh, kind of,” Eddie says. “He’s… It’s complicated. We need help.”

“Is he hurt?” Then Mike grimaces and closes the door. “Hang on.” Eddie hears the rattle as he takes the chain off, and then he opens the door again a little wider.

He is naked except for a pair of bright red boxers.

It’s getting a little more difficult for Eddie to keep from making assumptions about other people, here. Especially because behind him, in the bed, Bill is visible only from the nose up, peering over the edge of the duvet at Eddie with wide eyes.

“Richie’s hurt?” Bill asks, slightly muffled.

“Uh,” Eddie says, because a yes or no answer just doesn’t cut it right now. He remembers the little puncture marks on Richie’s fingers. “He’s—It bit him. And he didn’t—” _Go see a doctor, or get any kind of treatment_ , though what he said about alien rabies made sense. Even Eddie has no better idea of how to treat that bite, aside from _not going swimming in a quarry, Richie._ He isn’t sure what a doctor could do for him. “—do anything with it, and now he’s. Uh. Stuck.”

Both Mike and Bill blink at him.

“In the bathtub,” Eddie adds helpfully, in case they think that Richie is trapped between two walls or under something heavy. Which, admittedly, are also situations that he would probably try to recruit Mike for.

Mike’s _processing_ face is sort of funny for how serious it is. Eddie imagines the children of the Derry Public Library walking up to him, asking him for reference help. Eddie never really went to the library much as a kid—that was Ben’s territory—but he has a sort of _wise teacher_ vibe that, if Eddie had any faith in authority figures, would no doubt be deeply comforting.

“He’s trapped,” Mike repeats, as though making sure that he heard Eddie correctly. “In the bathtub.”

“Yes,” Eddie agrees. Clarifying the situation and making sure everyone understands it is an important step on the road to problem-solving.

Bill pipes up, “Uh—is Richie naked? In the bathtub?”

Both Eddie and Mike look at him, Mike turning all the way around. Bill pulls the duvet up a little higher. He becomes a pair of bright blue eyes and a puff of copper hair. He really shouldn’t touch that hotel duvet to his face; he doesn’t know anything about where it’s been or the Derry Town House’s laundry routine.

“Uh,” Eddie says again. Richie is not wearing clothes, but the problem is not that Richie’s dick is out, or that Eddie broke Richie during any particularly athletic sex in the bathtub. “Yes and no,” he decides.

“Is he _conscious_?” Mike asks. “Is there _water_ in the tub?”

“There is no water in the tub,” Eddie reports, because he would not have left Richie alone if there was a risk of Richie drowning in the bathtub, and he’s pretty sure he’s read somewhere that human beings can down in three tablespoons of water. Or maybe that’s just babies. Not that babies aren’t human beings.

“Do you need me and Ben to, like, drag him out?” Mike asks.

“Hey,” Bill says, muffled from under the blanket.

But they all know that if Eddie is unable to lift Richie, Bill _definitely_ won’t be able to lift Richie. Mike is asking pertinent, reasonable questions, trying to figure out why Eddie is going to him of all people, and unfortunately that’s just the problem.

“Uh, maybe,” Eddie says. “Um… He’s a werewolf?”

Bill and Mike stare at him.

“I don’t know why I said that like it’s a question. He’s a werewolf. Because he was him, and now he’s a big fucking wolf, and either Pennywise turned him into a wolf, or—I’m pretty sure that’s what a werewolf is. And he’s stuck in the bathtub.”

“Oh,” Mike says, like Eddie said the one thing that he needed to hear for this all to make sense. “You mean that he physically cannot get out of the bathtub.”

“Physically he cannot get out of the bathtub,” Eddie confirms. He has a sneaking suspicion that if Richie could have stopped him from leaving the hotel room, he would have. Eddie doesn’t feel great about it.

“Okay. Did he bite you? I mean—did he break the skin? You’ve got—” Mike gestures in the vicinity of Eddie’s mouth.

Eddie touches underneath what he knows is his split lip. Richie didn’t do that, Eddie did. But they had sex. And they didn’t use condoms. And while skin is somewhat absorbent—far less risky than, say, the anus or rectum—Richie came on him. The memory makes Eddie flush hot and cold at the same time, because in the moment he liked it—like, _really_ liked it—and now he can’t feel a fucking thing except budding hysteria.

But Eddie is also not going to be the asshole during the zombie movie who doesn’t warn the party that they’ve been bitten, so he says, “No, but we had unprotected sex, so I might turn too. I don’t know how lycanthropy is transmitted. Can I use your bathroom? There’s a werewolf in mine.”

Mike looks at Bill.

“Uh, good for you?” Bill tries, still under the duvet. “Go ahead.”

Eddie doesn’t wait for more explanations. He just walks straight to the bathroom and closes the door. He still has to pee, so he does that and washes his hands and doesn’t look up into the mirror of the medicine cabinet.

Richie was bitten by the Pomeranian thing at some point yesterday, and he definitely had a fever while they were in bed together, which Eddie should have taken seriously and called a halt to things, but he was thinking with his dick. Oh god, did Richie even want to have sex? Is this like with certain illnesses, where the host is driven to perform behaviors that might transmit viruses or parasites to others?

Focus.

Richie was exposed within the last twenty-four hours through blood contact—or rather, saliva introduced to the bloodstream, which means that it’s in saliva. Eddie probably swallowed a hell of a lot of Richie’s saliva yesterday and he has an open wound in his mouth—or he did, he’s not sure when the stab wound started to close up, but he did bite his lip and Richie kissed it better. Richie was right when he said that he should have just screamed.

But the only symptom—the _sign_ , really, that Eddie observed, because Richie wasn’t exactly forthcoming with personal details—was that Richie had a fever. And Eddie doesn’t feel feverish. He has a thermometer upstairs and he’ll have to take a baseline temperature.

Richie turned sometime between Eddie falling asleep and waking up, and Eddie doesn’t know what time that was because he was a little distracted, but there is an incubation period. So Eddie has time.

“Eddie?” Bill asks, knocking gently on the door.

Eddie becomes aware that he’s standing with his head almost in the tiny sink, the metal faucet jabbing into his forehead. He stands up again—the metal is spotted and filthy.

“Sorry,” he says, and opens the door.

Bill and Mike have put clothes on, thank God, and not the clothes they were wearing yesterday. Mike’s clothes are laughably too small for him, his wrists sticking out from the cuffs of the shirt, and he’s trying to roll up the sleeves as Eddie comes out of the bathroom. Eddie’s eyes go straight to Mike’s wrist, because he took a knife wound yesterday and they didn’t get that treated either, but the mark is now a keloid scar, shiny and faintly rounded.

“Hey,” Bill says. “Mike’s gonna go guh—up.” He winces and plunges forward. “Up and check on Richie. You don’t have to go if-f-f— _few_ don’t want to, Mike just needs the key.”

Eddie immediately bristles at the suggestion that he might not want to go check on Richie. He told Richie that he’d be back. And he woke up this morning thinking that maybe Richie ran out on him, in bed alone, and that made him feel—

He goes cold. His hand flies to his hip pocket. He remembers Richie pretending to look for his wallet, groping him and making him jerk—and then Eddie grabbed his wallet and got them into the room, and threw both wallet and keycard—

“Oh, _fffuck_ ,” Eddie says, pulling out the fricative just like Bill. He looks up at him in horror. “I don’t have my key. Bill, I don’t have my key, I locked it in my room, I don’t have my key.”

Bill’s hands come up—Eddie doesn’t know what for—and Eddie immediately steps backwards into the bathroom, which is functionally identical to the bathroom just one floor up, where Richie is trapped.

“No!” Eddie gasps, and Bill takes another half-step forward. “Don’t touch me, I’m—I might have it. I don’t know.”

He needs his thermometer again, needs to check for signs of fever, but his thermometer is also locked in his room, and Richie didn’t report any symptoms, and Eddie can’t ask him because Richie can’t speak and is also _trapped in Eddie’s locked hotel room_.

Bill lowers his hands. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do, all right?” His tone is soothing, and the part of Eddie’s psyche that’s shuddering like a nervous horse stills to listen to it, wary. “We’re gonna go to the front desk. You’re going to explain that you locked your key in your room. Do you have your wallet?”

“No,” Eddie says. “No, I don’t have my ID, what if they don’t—”

“Shhh,” Bill says. “You’re going to explain that you locked your ID in your room. They’re going to give you another key, or they’ll open the door for you. Okay?”

“Okay,” Eddie says. He feels sickly grateful, one wrong word away from bursting out laughing. He locked his key in his room. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Bill says. “Let’s go do that.”

* * *

There’s no one working at the counter.

Eddie feels a wave of rage so strong that he can’t do anything but bunch his hands into fists and scream with his mouth shut. Then he rants, “Motherfucking piece of shit town child-killing lazy assholes fucking _hotel_ —”

Bill doesn’t even bother trying to shush him this time, just dings the bell. The delicate little chime makes Eddie fall silent.

He, Bill, and Mike wait.

Nothing happens.

Eddie starts laughing.

“Okay,” Bill says, his tone still soothing. It does nothing. Eddie laughs harder.

Bill slips around behind the desk. He opens up the laptop and looks at the screen. “It’s all right,” he says again, and then ducks to look under the desk. He produces a bright white binder, which he opens and then sets to the side. He taps on the keyboard.

“Do they just leave their password lying around?” Eddie giggles.

“Yep,” Bill says. “You’d be surprised how many places do. There’s a real psychological sense of authority about who is and who is not allowed behind the counter or whatever.”

The idea of Bill’s secret life as a cat burglar makes Eddie crack up harder.

Mike is likewise in problem-solving mode. “I don’t suppose this is the kind of place where all their keycards are synced to the same frequency?” he asks doubtfully. He’s holding one of two keycards to Bill’s room.

“You could go up and test it,” Bill says.

“Uh, guys?”

Eddie shuts up and turns around. Stan and Patty are standing just inside the front door. Both of them are holding Starbucks cups—Stan has a white coffee cup, and Patty has a big clear plastic one that shows lots of sliced fruit floating in some kind of juice. She sips at it through a green straw, looking alert but casual.

“What’s happening?” Stan asks.

“Eddie’s locked out of his room,” Bill says calmly, still probably committing trespassing by logging into the Town House’s system without authorization.

This is such an understatement of all of the problems presented by this morning that Eddie grins.

“Okay,” Stan says slowly. His gaze slides over to Eddie. “And Richie can’t… open it for you?”

Eddie swallows. “No.”

There is a long moment where Stan just looks at him, almost blankly taking in whatever Eddie’s face is doing right now. Then Stan’s expression twists and he just explodes. He jerks his arms and coffee spills out of the travel lid of his cup and all over his hand. “Seriously?” he demands. “You had it all fucking sewn up yesterday—where is he?” He strides toward the stairs.

“Honey,” Patty says.

“No!” Stan almost shouts back. “I am not doing this again, I’m going to strangle him myself, we all almost _died_ —”

“Stanley,” Patty says, her voice suddenly iron-hard.

Eddie feels the nervous thing in him quiet at the sign of authority. Stan freezes halfway up the stairs.

Patty gives him a cool look and gestures toward Eddie with her fruit drink. “Your friend has a problem. Why don’t you ask him if he wants your help with it?”

“His problem is six-foot-whatever and ninety-percent mouth,” Stan says, but he leans on the banister instead of continuing to storm up the stairs, possibly with the intention of defending Eddie’s honor. He glares down at Eddie. “Did he hurt you?”

“No,” Eddie replies blandly.

“Did he hurt your _feelings_ , I mean.”

“No,” Eddie says again, his voice small. Apparently they all know, and that gets Eddie’s heart thumping so hard he can hear it in his ears, but it’s not like Eddie was exactly subtle yesterday. These are the consequences of behaving that way in public.

Stan’s brow furrows in confusion. “Did you throw him out?”

“No.”

“Okay,” Bill says. He’s still standing behind the counter. “I have the system up. The problem is, I don’t know how to magnetize these cards. Fortunately—” He slaps the open binder. “There’s a table of contents in here. Give me a sec.”

“Shouldn’t they have extra cards for housekeeping and staff, in case of emergency?” Mike asks. He ducks around the counter too and hunches down, looking.

Eddie swallows. “He’s stuck in the bathtub,” he tells Stan.

Patty gags suddenly, spitting her fruit drink onto the floor. Everyone freezes and looks at her, waiting for some Derry-typical horror—spitting out blood or shit or something. She covers her mouth.

“Sorry,” she says. “Sorry, I’m fine, I just.”

Stan gives his wife a hawkish look and then comes back down a few steps. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Patty repeats, smiling faintly. “Just—down the wrong pipe, you know.”

She didn’t cough even a little bit, just retched. Her smile widens, like she’s trying to prove a point.

Stan comes back down the stairs and wraps an arm around her shoulders, and Patty leans into him. Stan turns his assessing look on Eddie. “What do you mean, ‘stuck in the bathtub’?”

Bill and Mike remain unhelpfully silent. Bill turns a few pages in the binder.

Eddie takes a deep breath. “Pennywise turned him into a werewolf, and now he is stuck in the bathtub. It bit him yesterday, and now—he’s a werewolf, and he’s stuck in the bathtub.” He can feel himself grinning, but he knows Stan will know it’s the truth, and it’s not funny at all.

Patty and Stan stare at Eddie. Eddie waits for follow-up questions.

Then Stan turns to the counter. “Is It dead?” he asks.

“I thought It was dead,” Mike replies from under the counter. The top of his head is visible as he crouches, searching for other keys. “The heart was… a pretty good fake, if it wasn’t, but the scars were going, and the scars weren’t It. And I woke up with my arm healed, and Eddie’s healing too.”

Stan looks at Eddie again, inspecting his cheek.

“When you say he’s stuck in the bathtub,” Patty says slowly. “Do you mean he’s physically trapped in the bathtub? Is the bathroom door locked?”

Eddie takes a few deep breaths. “I think that he was in the bathtub, and then he turned, and now he’s too big to get out of the bathtub,” he says slowly.

“Oh no,” Patty says, as though this is a perfectly normal problem that she knows how to correctly express sympathy for. She covers her mouth again. “How long has he been in there?”

Eddie takes a few breaths. “I don’t know,” he admits, feeling like he’s failed in keeping an eye on Richie. He knew he was too flushed, he was burning up. He should have stopped.

“Is he aggressive?” Stan asks. “Or are you sure it’s Richie in there?”

“I’m sure it’s Richie in there,” Eddie says. He swallows. “He seemed to understand when I talked. He, uh. Didn’t want me to leave.”

“Mikey, can I have the spare, uh—” Bill holds his hand out and glances at the rest of them.

“I’m telling you, there should be blanks here,” Mike says.

“Just give him the key,” Eddie almost snaps.

Everyone is very still and quiet. Slowly, Mike raises his head from behind the counter.

Eddie covers his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry, I don’t--”

“It’s okay, honey,” Patty says. She holds out an arm to him and Eddie takes a step back. She smiles at him--not trying to lure him in, but like it’s really okay that Eddie doesn’t want to be touched.

There’s a beeping sound as Bill taps the key to a device on the counter. “Okay,” he says cheerfully. “Let’s go test it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, mads!


End file.
